Modern computing often requires the collection, processing, or storage of very large data sets or file systems. Accordingly, to accommodate the capacity requirements as well as other requirements, such as, high availability, redundancy, latency/access considerations, or the like, modern file systems may be very large or distributed across multiple hosts, networks, or data centers, and so on. In many cases, distributed file systems may be accessed from client systems that may have different or mismatched permission or access control semantics. Reasonable users may expect file system object permissions or access control semantics that are (or appear to be) consistent with the permissions or access control semantics native to client system they are working with. In some cases, the mismatch of permission or access control semantics across client systems may cause undesirable results that confuse or frustrate users of distributed file system. Also, the incompatibilities between different permission systems may result in arbitrary or inconsistent standards for mapping between different permission systems. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.